Hello, my performance applies to one invention I discovered about two years ago and it had a serious influence on my life since that moment.
This invention is linked with mass accommodation. Russia has a serious position in the mass accommodation deals.
When the foreign architects come to Russia and see new districts they usually say: “Hm, we have the same districts but we reconstruct them, you must be too.”
But we answer that we are just building them and that means that the accommodation type we are building is already canceled.
That thing has been really bothering me because I’ve been working in the architecture area in Russia for fifteen years already and I really think that it has to be changed.
I’m working hard for it. I’ve been publishing a magazine and I’ve organized a … the first architecture … .
I gave foreign examples there and I gave lectures in this hall to the social council under the President of Russian Federation about how we should change Russian society to get that accommodations.
But at the moment of giving that lecture I knew that it’s impossible because no one is able to change the society and just wait for the moment of changes.
We should study that issue harder. And I did it. I was trying to understand why the way of creation of high-grade accommodation is possible on the West and impossible here.
And I understood that there are two different cities here. There are model and design cities here. The model city was built while socialism. It’s a city which is being built very fast and cheap.
It includes sections. And the process of copying these sections creates the city space. The design city is a completely different city.
It is being created in a specific and conceptual way by different architects. It is very various and it is believed to a very good city. Why do these two cities are so different?
The moment of the Liberalism’s appearance here and on the West is very important. Because the model cities were also created on the West in 70’s.
But there was one problem at the period of Capitalism’s development. The private properties of the land have appeared. The Municipal government was not able to keep it that way, they just had no money.
And the started working with private developers. The areas which needed new projects have appeared. And every area needed an individual project because of their different sizes.
People didn’t want equal houses any more. That happened at the same time with the Capitalism’s development.
They wanted some variety just like about clothes or cars. They wanted to have various houses. This situation required individual projects and conceptual architecture from the architects because they are artists after all.
We’ve been switching over communism to capitalism in Russia and we can see that there is a border between private property and the social space.
This border is being marked by fences. There are more and more fences on the lots’ borders. The process of creation of these borders in the cities has already started.
So we can see that the free spaced city is becoming a district city and these districts are really bad marked out because they are marked out with fences.
The districts on the West look really good because they were adjusted for that places.
But it’s very expensive to adjust and build these districts because it’s more expensive to build something on the West than to build something in Russia.
And it takes a lot of time to prepare such an individual project. It takes about seven years to implement the project from the very beginning in Holland.
Nowadays Holland and the west Europe have real problems with that because when the prices were raising people were able to pay the bills and now it is very hard because of the crisis and falling prices(nobody knows how to finance this process).
Now we understand why it’s impossible in Russia. We just don’t have enough time and money for such projects. That means that our city is a bad one because we have a city where the worst of communism and the worst of capitalism combine. I mean this fences.
It’s horrible and we have to solve this problem. We can’t use the ideas from the West because it’s too hard.
That means that we should make something individual and conceptual and start the mass production. But how? This is a casual question for every production sector.
Clothes… Every person needs the variety of clothes. Shoes… It concerns not only clothes or shoes. It concerns video, for example. DVD, DVD gives us a possibility of watching all the movies.
If we had the variety of the formats it could be really hard to spread the little number drawling things.
That means that we should make a standard because standard doesn’t make things unique, it makes the innovation and it gives the variety.
For example, we don’t visit the shoemaker who makes an individual type of shoes but we go to the shop and see the variety of shoes(different colors and quality) according to our foot size.
This is much more various than the ideas of the shoemakers. Unfortunately there is no such thing in architecture yet. Of course we can choose the material but still there are no standards for projects.
That’s why we should make a standard for the size of the lot and this will give us a possibility of repeating projects. In that case we will get a model of some project but not a model for just one place or like we had in 60’s which we could copy.
We have project which we can realize in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Habarovsk , Tomsk, etc., etc. Every architect could say that it’s not interesting just to copy the projects, but as he enters the city he’ll see that it’s various because of the mix of these projects.
So, we’ll save the money for this very expensive project that requires seven years and at the same time we’ll create a various city which will fit it’s lot. Thank you very much.